Communications IT Excellence (Diagnostic)
IT Resource and Strategy Consulting
Reduce Complexity, Create Business Value and Achieve Greater Agility
Cost reductions continue to be a key business driver in the communications industry. To compete effectively, communications services providers consolidate through mergers and acquisitions. As a result, major carriers and cable companies are looking for cost synergies across the merged entities. Typically, storage and server consolidation provides potential quick-win opportunities. Application rationalization, on the other hand, is required to exploit benefits beyond the low-hanging fruit.
Service providers also face the commoditization of the traditional voice business; customers are becoming price conscious and demanding innovation and better customer service – they will easily switch if not satisfied. And the communications and IT businesses are converging; some communications service providers are offering managed IT services, and some service providers are moving into content and entertainment services.
To address these challenges and build top-line growth, you need to transform your enterprise. Managing the customer experience and customer lifetime value is the key to success. However, a business-driven transformation of the IT environment to drastically improve the cost economics of IT is a prerequisite and the first stage a service provider needs to enter and commit to in order to create business value.
Rationalize the Application Footprint
EDS applies a proven methodology to rationalize your applications and its supporting IT infrastructure environment and improve the overall economics of your IT organization. With your plan of providing a world-class customer experience in mind, we can help you transform your IT environment to reposition yourself to meet that goal. Our application rationalization approach not only systematically reduces IT costs, but also lays the foundation to transform your IT environment by freeing up funds for new developments.
IT Excellence Diagnostics is the initial step of a broader IT portfolio optimization and rationalization to improve the economics of your IT organization. We take an end-to-end view of IT with a primary focus on applications and IT infrastructure. Other dimensions include selective IT outsourcing, IT organization transformation, IT project rationalization, IT sourcing and IT spending and staffing rationalization. Our proven rationalization approach includes three major phases:
- The pre-rationalization diagnostic phase
- The rationalization design phase
- The rationalization execution phase
Address Inefficiencies In IT
Mergers and acquisitions, new technologies, product lines and services rapid growth and expansion into new geographies have created a complex applications and IT infrastructure environment for many communications service providers. However, as organizations mature, an increased focus has to be given on the overall economics, and inefficiencies need to get systematically eliminated. Some of the major inefficiencies that typically drive incremental cost in the industry include the following:
- Misalignment of the IT activity to business strategy and operations
- Lack of effective business or IT governance
- Proliferation of applications
- Duplication of functionality, systems and support infrastructure
- Operations performed in silos
- Inappropriate enhancements and use of systems
- Fragmented information architecture
Reduce the Complexity of IT and Improve Its Economics
Our Communications IT Excellence Solution for communications, media & entertainment service providers uses the enhanced Telecom Operations Map® (eTOM) as a reference framework for segmenting your applications portfolio and defining meaningful business functions for analysis and recommendations to replace, retire, transform or consolidate applications. The resulting environment is not only more cost effective, but also increases your ability to leverage the application architecture across all of your customer contact points and services.
We identify potential cost savings by:
- Aggregating, cataloging and analyzing costs of individual applications by business functions
- Assessing the existing application and IT infrastructure portfolio for current and future plans
- Developing technology plan, IT blueprint and transition road map
- Prioritizing opportunities for consolidation, decommissioning or enhancements based on a financial baseline supported by a business case for change
Transform Your Enterprise and Create Business Value
Reducing IT costs in a systematic and sustainable way lays the foundation for a broader transformation and the creation of business value. The resulting savings can free up capital for investments the strategic platforms need to support new competencies. This involves providing:
- A platform for the delivery of truly integrated services
- A consistent customer experience across multiple devices and networks
- A streamlined and simplified order-to-cash process
- A low fixed-cost base and cost-effective scalability as volumes grow faster than revenues
To ensure the best chance of a successful transformation, you should adopt a long-term strategic view of your business and business agenda, and then take an incremental approach to implementing the transformation plan. This puts a strong focus on delivering business value at every step.
Our analysis reveals that in the early stage of the transformation process, legacy modernization can generate significant short-term benefits. And the savings and efficiencies achieved in this early stage also prepare you for the longer-term transformational journey. After the newer systems cut over into production, additional efficiencies can be used to accelerate the transformation.
Transformation initiatives may include:
- Decommissioning and redesign of your business silos that, given changes in markets and technology, are now obsolete
- The use of business models such as eTOM to define a future-state enterprise architecture and align business processes to that structure
- Modernization of legacy fulfillment, assurance and billing systems
- Redesign and integration of service delivery environments and go-to-market models
- Introduction of an integrated portfolio of products and services needed to build a sustainable competitive advantage
- Redesign and modernization of the enterprise integration layer, ensuring organization-wide connectivity and data integrity
Benefits of Transformation
By transforming your enterprise, you can achieve a series of business benefits:
- Redirection of savings to strategic investments that yield maximum ROI
- Improved customer experience
- New revenue streams created by new core competencies
- Accelerated time to market for new products and services
Choose EDS
By examining the high-cost areas across approximately 2,300 applications of a communications services provider, we were able to:
- Retire 50 applications
- Develop 16 business case and transition plans
- Identify recurring annual IT savings of 28 percent
Related EDS Services:
- Applications Modernization Services
- Applications Management Services
- Applications Management Services - Enterprise
- LINK MISSING
- LINK MISSING
- Managed Mainframe Services
With EDS' 33 years of experience in your industry and 7,000 employees dedicated to communications for 50 percent of the global 100 communications companies, we have the knowledge, resources and proven solutions to help you transform your business.
For more information about what EDS can do for you, submit a business inquiry.